Deeplinks

Last month we submitted comments to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), an agency within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, opposing its proposal to gather social media handles from foreign visitors from Visa Waiver Program (VWP) countries. CBP recently provided its preliminary responses (“Supporting Statement”) to several of our arguments (CBP also extended the comment deadline to September 30). But CBP has not adequately addressed the points we made.

On September 14, Ask Your Representative to Oppose the TPP

It's now or never for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). It's almost certain that if the TPP can't pass during the lame duck session of Congress in its present form before the new President takes office, it won't pass at all.

Edward Snowden’s 2013 release of once-secret documents about U.S. intelligence surveillance of the private communications of Americans and non-U.S. persons focused much-needed attention on the problem of how to control the burgeoning U.S. surveillance-industrial complex.

But while the USA Freedom Act began to limit national security surveillance to some extent—and we hope for more limits given that FISA Section 702 is scheduled to expire in December 2017—it did little to address the underlying problem of excessive executive branch secrecy. We remain largely in the dark about many of the facts of surveillance conducted by the U.S. government and its foreign intelligence community allies.

Let’s Send a Message to the FCC: Consumers, Not Hollywood, Should Drive the Pay TV Market

The FCC is about to make a decision about whether third-party companies can market their own alternatives to the set-top boxes provided by cable companies. Under the proposed rules, instead of using the box from Comcast, you could buy your own from a variety of different manufacturers. It could even have features that Comcast wouldn’t dream of, like letting you sync your favorite shows onto your mobile phone or search across multiple free TV, pay TV, and amateur video sites.

Imagine: you're a programmer who loves to code. You're studying at college, but you're also working as a freelance web developer. In what spare time you have, you polish and release your best work under an open source license, for the world to use. Your father has grown sick and may be dying, and so you take a short break to travel back to the country of your birth to visit him.

In a case which threatens to cause turmoil for thousands if not millions of websites, the Court of Justice of the European Union decided today that a website that merely links to material that infringes copyright, can itself be found guilty of copyright infringement, provided only that the operator knew or could reasonably have known that the material was infringing. Worse, they will be presumed to know of this if the links are provided for "the pursuit of financial gain".